Month: January 2016

I’d been up for a while, catching up on some red-ink dispersion, but was now heading for those woods on the skyline, to catch the sunrise.I should really have set off earlier; twenty minutes before the sun came up the clouds were suffused with a pink glow which I didn’t have a decent vantage point to photograph.

When the sun did finally rise, it was obscured by the clouds on the eastern horizon. I suppose I could have waited, but my toes were cold, I had places to be (well a place – Cartmell – to collect B from a night away with his team-mates), and if I had stayed put, I would have missed the spectacle of the sun appearing through the snow-rimmed trees…

As I’ve noted before, coming back down the hill creates an illusion of a second sunrise…

The title pretty much says it all, so I could just let the pictures do the talking, but I rarely miss an opportunity to pontificate, so: no such luck.

When I lived in Arnside, I could see Whitbarrow Scar from my living room window. Not that surprising then, that I used to come this way often. Far more surprising, is the fact that, since I moved back to Silverdale, I’ve rarely been back, and until just after Christmas, the kids had never been at all. The path in the picture above, not a right-of-way and not shown on my OS map, but as you can see, extremely well made, winds it’s way up the steep hillside without, mercifully, ever becoming steep itself. Leading to…

…an old bench with a bit of a view…

…presently of flooded fields. The hillside here was, long ago, the coastline. The river in the distance is the Kent, with Arnside Knott and Beetham Fell beyond.

A short climb from the bench, and then a slight detour from the main path, leads to the top of the scar and even more expansive views.

I was playing with the panorama function again…

We found a sheltered spot for a brew and some left-over goose sandwiches and then continued across the plateau towards Whitbarrow’s highest point.

The view behind of the Kent Estuary was magnificent. (You probably need to click on the photos to see bigger versions in flickr to get the full benefit of the panorama shots.)

Looking towards the top.

Eastward: floods in the Lyth valley.

At the top.

Heading for the descent route…

…which cuts very steeply through the trees.

Two more panoramas. Light a bit too low at this point I think.

On the outskirts of the hamlet of Beck Head we found this…

…very well appointed self-service cafe with honesty box.

I shall have to contrive a walk which arrives here in the middle, rather than near the end, so as to feel justified in partaking of what’s on offer. (Purely for research purposes you understand).

The boys were very taken with the actual Beck Head, where the stream appears from underground.

A slightly longer version of this walk appears in Wainwright’s ‘Outlying Fells’ and he says of it:

The walk described is the most beautiful in this book; beautiful it is every step of the way.

Two views from the top of RSPB Leighton Moss’s new Skytower. Which is…well, a tower. It’s about 30’ feet tall – affording great views, but hardly scaling empyrean heights.

I think the RSPB can be forgiven the hyperbole – it really is a great place from watch a quartering Marsh Harrier, or flocks of Teal on the mere…

…as I did.

My walk to the Skytower was just before Christmas, in a moment of calm before the next storm hit.

The causeway across the Moss was still flooded from the previous deluges, but I had new Wellies and waded across, then wandered past Leighton Hall and up Summer House Hill to the benches and viewpoint at the top…

Naturally, I decided to sit for a while, despite the bracing wind, and was rewarded by some close up views of a pair of buzzards.

I associate the display flights of male buzzards with the onset of spring.

Pairs mate for life. To attract a mate (or impress his existing mate) the male performs a ritual aerial display before the beginning of spring. This spectacular display is known as ‘the roller coaster’. He will rise high up in the sky, to turn and plummet downward, in a spiral, twisting and turning as he comes down. He then rises immediately upward to repeat the exercise.

from Wikipedia

I wonder if these birds were confused by the very mild weather which we had been experiencing, as many of our spring flowering plants seem to have been.

Buzzards, now thought to be Britain’s most numerous raptors, are very common in this area. But…

“…the species large size, free-floating movements on broad wings and wild high calls still have a capacity to capture our attention and imaginations.”

from ‘Birds Britannica’ by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey

I certainly never tire of watching them.

From Summer House Hill I walked through Cringlebarrow Woods and Yealand Allotment to Hawes Water…

On the Sunday I missed the opportunity to get out with any of the others – it’s a long(ish) story involving a cancelled rugby match and a lack of mobile phone reception, but the long and the short of it was that I was ready for a walk at about midday. The weather was forecast to be mixed, which was how it turned out, but mostly dry with some spectacular sunny spells.

The obvious choice was an ascent of Ingleborough via the flagged path through Humphrey Bottom, which I remember as a purgatorial quagmire on my first visits to this area back in the Eighties.

This route has a short, sharp shock in store – a final (well almost) steep ascent to gain the ridge.

I arrived on the huge plateau of the top at an opportune moment – just in time for a break in the cloud and some wonderful, low winter sunlight.

During my ascent I’d bumped into Uncle Fester on his way down. He opined that whilst the route along the ridge looked attractive, the inevitably pathless descent from it would be deeply tedious after all the wet weather we’d had. I could see that he was absolutely right. But I couldn’t resist…

This was the third time in recent years that I’ve followed this path, skirting Simon Fell and sticking to the edge – it’s a cracker.

Especially when the sun shines!

The most prominent view from there is across the valley to Whernside – tantalisingly, the clouds kept ushering patches of sunshine across the valley below without ever spotlighting the ridge or the summit. Until…

In the end the descent wasn’t anything like as bad as it might have been – I found a sheep track which traversed from the low point in the ridge before Park Fell, then I followed a wall to a track and then found another path, not marked on my map, which took me through the Ingleborough National Nature Reserve back to Great Douk Cave and hence to the Old School House.

Our thirteenth annual-rent-a-hostel-pre-Christmas-weekend-with-our-camping-friends (snappy title eh?). The first ten of those were characterised by snow, ice, and generally artic weather conditions. (At least when viewed through my backward-glancing rose-tinted spectacles.) But for the last three years, since we decided to relocate to Chapel-le-Dale above Ingleton, the weather has been mild, wet and generally abysmal. To be fair, this year’s trip, amidst all the general carnage, had the best weather of the three to date, with some decent dry spells between the showers.

On the Saturday we took the kids for a longish walk up to the moor beyond Ribblehead Viaduct.

We were well prepared with head-torches and wellies and had a very enjoyable poke about in some of the caves to be found up there. Hardly surprisingly, they were pretty wet, and some of us resolved to come back for another look-see when the conditions are a bit drier.

I’ve explored and written about these caves in a bit more detail before – there’s a post about them here, which includes a link to a more much complete and expert account on another blog, if you are thinking of trying the caves yourself.

By the time we’d finished our exploration, the weather had deteriorated considerably and I think the children who had remained found it rather a long trudge back in the rain and gathering gloom. Still, chilli, guacamole, corn bread and tortilla chips (for 22) followed, accompanied by the usual banter and re-hashed jokes. Marvellous.

So, with the electricity out in Lancaster I found myself off work with some unexpected free time. When it became apparent that this would happen, my first thought was, “I’ll paint the kitchen.”

Well, that may have been my second thought, after “I can have a lie in.” Or third perhaps, after “I could get out for a good walk”. And if not third, it was definitely my fourth or maybe fifth, well, not more than my eleventh thought. It occurred to me just after TBH said: “You could paint the kitchen,” as she lugged paint tins, brushes, etc in from the garage, wearing an expression which brooked no argument.

I did get out for some short strolls, between showers.

Down at the Cove I could see various large bits of flotsam, presumably washed into the channel by the storm. I could also see the next shower advancing across the Bay…

Time to get back to the painting!

The kitchen does look spick and span though. It’s white now. Much better than before.